ESQ: A Journal of the American Renaissance

Susan L. Roberson

When Susan Warner was staying with her publisher, George Putnam, readying
her first novel, The Wide, Wide World, for publication, she apparently
was asked to pare down her rather long story. A significant problem from
Putnam's point of view was the novel's length, and part of Warner's task as she
was correcting proofs was to trim where she could. Several of the sections that
Warner cut comprised an early episode about a character she refers to as a
"little black girl."

That Warner initially wrote an episode that involved her heroine, Ellen
Montgomery, with an African American child and then expunged it provides us
with some new ways of thinking about Warner's project in writing her novel.
While critics and readers have generally focused on the novel's sentimentality
and the Christian ethos it portrays and advocates, attention to the omitted
sections widens our understanding of Warner's undertaking, suggesting that she
was concerned about the condition of black people in America in 1848, when she
began to write her novel, even if ambivalently. Ellen's encounters with the
African American child imply the possibilities for spatial and social relations
when boundaries between the races become more porous--when a little white girl
and a little black girl can meet and begin a friendship, if only for a chapter
or two. The episode, which occurs in New York City in both public and private
settings, raises not only geographic and racial but also feminist issues,
providing a subtext for the published version of the novel. Questions about
race and about the appropriation of black characters that emerge in the
expunged sections and related questions about autonomy and freedom that persist
in the published version ask us to read the novel from a broader perspective
than we have before--to see Warner's racial politics as crucial to
understanding her attitude toward Ellen's, and women's, position in antebellum
America. But Warner's erasure of the one episode that explicitly foregrounds
race also asks us to place her among the white writers whom Toni Morrison
criticizes, those who contemplate their own condition through the figure of the
invisible African and yet leave most dimensions of the nation's unjust race
relations "'unspoken.'"